Wow, I went from metacrawler (back in the DAY) to ask, and eventually the big G. Can’t believe Ask.com is shutting down! I’m blind and was unable to find an official link – would anyone mind providing one?

Thanks for having me as cohost, Jeremy, it was fun! My twitter feed is actually http://www.twitter.com/jenstar tho for anyone who wants to follow my random comments sprinkled with bits of wisdom here and there

You know, I used to work for Ask when it was Ask Jeeves. Back in the dot-com bubble and bust. And it had the same problem then that it has now: it couldn’t just stick with one identity. It has always and repeatedly, over the years, sabotaged itself (or depending on your perspective, been sabotaged) by changing what the search engine provides, trying to expand into applications, expanding into creating mini-Asks for corporate customers, changing what the search engine does AGAIN, dropping everything it was doing, doing something else, dropping that, changing the function of the search engine AGAIN…. This isn’t new. It’s the hopefully-last thrash of a good concept yanked around by a really dysfunctional (as she describes in her post) corporate structure.

Me too, Ask was great to start with – the concept of askign a full question rather than just a bunch of keywords, can’t remember when I started to use Google and have it as my homepage. I think the simplicity of Google was what sold it to most people over Yahoo and Ask.

Well said. Google constantly changes stuff behind the scenes, but their front end doesn’t change as often and as aggressively as Ask has in the past. Improvement through added features is one thing, but revamping the entire system is another. People are usually reluctant to change, and if forced to change over and over, there’s a good chance they’ll just stop coming back!

That was an emotional post by Lisa Barones about Ask.com. I wonder why a company would want to go backwards just because the profit isn’t where they want it to be. Wouldn’t you just find a way to improve something, instead of sending back to the dark ages? I haven’t used Ask.com as much as other engines, so it doesn’t really hurt me. It’s just too bad for the users that liked it the way it was.
~Terry